The Great Cost of Journalism in Vladimir Putin's Russia

Take, for example, the eerie deaths of investigative journalists like Anna Politkovskaya.

Donald Trump’s first press conference on Wednesday offered a mission statement to the American media: cooperate or become the enemy. The President-elect responded flippantly, dismissing questions from publications that published an unverified dossier: a 35-page PDF filled with NSFW tales of urine-soaked hotel rooms, back-room meetings, and folder upon folders of Russian kompromat. “FAKE NEWS!” he spat, barked, and tweeted.

America is currently gorging on a smorgasbord of Trump headlines, and the mainstream media is, at this very moment, recalibrating its news sense for how to handle the incoming administration. Trump’s antagonistic relationship with the free press—which he both feeds off and fuels, usually in the form of 3 A.M. tweets—is still light years away from the man who may or may not be in his ear. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, journalism has long been under siege.

“Russian reporters during the Yeltsin era didn’t make a living wage,” says Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, who lived and worked as an editor of the Moscow-based expat newspaper, The eXile, for eleven years. “So most journalists resorted to selling jeans.” The phrase gets its name from the post-Soviet fartsovshik practice of selling cheap denim or oranges on the black market in order to get by. Far from flipping selvedge, reporters would trade and publish compromising information with gangsters in exchange for cold, hard cash.

When Putin assumed power, Taibbi notes, he quickly “consolidated corruption, creating a monolithic media.” Opposition, critics, and naysayers were quickly corralled into contrarian publications like Novaya Gazeta. “They didn’t make any money, the work was high risk and it put families in danger,” says Taibbi. “The journalists I knew who were writing when Putin came to power were heroic.”

Nestled deep in the southernmost corner of Eastern Europe, there is a relatively tiny little republic called Chechnya. Its Capital city, Grozny, has a name that translates quite literally to both Awesome and Terrible—as in, Ivan the Terrible. The last official census estimated Chechnya’s population at between 1.2 to 1.4 million people, but that number has faced some serious scrutiny. Experts find it hard to believe that that the country could be possibly experiencing a baby boom after being embroiled in two armed conflict in as many decades. Furthermore, a nationwide policy of Islamization means that the republic is friendly toward polygamy, but not so much toward respites like gambling and alcohol.

This gradual transition toward a more conservative way of life is largely the project of the only man suited to take on the Grozny mantle in all its Terribleness and Awesomeness: Ramzan Kadyrov. The son of assassinated former Chechen rebel-leader-turned-president Akhmad Kadyrov, Ramzan soared through the ranks of the Chechen state, quickly ascending to the position of Prime Minister. (His only obstacle apparently, is that in Chechnya, you have to be 30 years old to be President.)

Ramzan has a cult of personality going for him: his Wikipedia page boasts that he founded a fighting club and sponsored wrestling tournaments; he pals around with UFC stars and has wrestled crocodiles and various other fauna; at one point he even hung out with Mike Tyson. His Instagram is absolutely bonkers—his cat recently went missing and an IG post enacted a hive-like following searching for his lost pet. Most recently, he attempted to rehab his public reputation with an eerily Apprentice-esque reality TV show, called The Team.

Perhaps more notable than his public hijinks, however, is his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. When Kadyrov spoke to Russian GQ back in 2005, he said:

“Putin is gorgeous. He thinks more about Chechnya than about any other
republic [of the Russian Federation]. When my father was murdered, he
[Putin] came and went to the cemetery in person. Putin has stopped the
war. Putin should be made president for life.”

Obviously this kind of glowing, buddy-buddy praise of the perennially icy Vladimir Vladimirovich is rare and hard-won. (Sounds familiar.) But peeking beyond the viral headlines and lizard-wrestling, Kadyrov has quite a fearsome reputation. In the early 2000s, Kadyrov faced heavy scrutiny from domestic and international media for charges of widespread government corruption, intimidation, and human rights violations, particularly in the prisons manned by his personal militia, the Kadyrovtsi.

Naturally, someone wanted to help tell these stories. “Right now I have two photographs on my desk,” wrote one journalist. “I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov's prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi for completely inexplicable reasons and who died. They died as part of a PR campaign.” These were the words of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative journalist born in New York City who covered the Chechen conflict both at length and in depth, honing in particular on the exploits of the young Kadyrov. The interview above was carried out on October 5, 2006—Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, his first year of eligibility for the more legitimate title of president.

The contents of said investigative reports would have presumably caused significant trouble for Ramzan’s imminent presidential run. A year earlier, Politkovskaya had boldly sat down for a conversation with then-Prime Minister Kadyrov, grilling him on all of the above and more. Midway through the conversation, one of the PM’s assistants told Anna: “Someone ought to have shot… right on the street, like they do in your Moscow,” at which Ramzan repeated: "You're an enemy to be shot."

The fact of the matter was that Anna had already suffered such threats and worse. In 2004, the journalist was en route to the Beslan region to help negotiate a tense hostage-taking crisis at a local school when she fell violently ill with food poisoning and was evacuated from the plane in Rostov-on-Don. A doctored cup of tea she drank soon after takeoff was found to be poisoned. The Beslan school siege eventually lasted three days and ended up claiming the lives of 385 people, the majority of them children.

"Anybody can be gotten. That’s one of the most prescient lessons of the Putin era."

On October 7, 2005—just two days after announcing her investigation into Kadyrov’s corruption—Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the elevator bank of her apartment building. Coincidentally, her death fell on the same day as President Putin’s birthday.

The loss of Politkovskaya was a critical blow to investigative journalism in Putin’s Russia. Just a month after her death, former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko suddenly fell ill and died of what was later found to be the first case of radioactive polonium poisoning—this news coming after him writing several books on the subject of Putin’s rise to power.

Other notable deaths include the still-unsolved murder of Paul Khlebnikov, the American editor of Russian Forbes, who was killed just days after publishing a list of Russia’s Top 100 Richest Men, many of whom had long-standing connections to V.V.—Khlebnikov was shot on July 9, 2004 while leaving the Forbes offices and was delivered to the hospital in an ambulance without an oxygen tank before he passed away in a malfunctioning elevator.

“Anybody can be gotten,” says Taibbi, “that’s one of the most prescient lessons of the Putin era.” The list of critics, both within and without the media, is lengthy: Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician, spoke out vehemently against Putin’s profiteering in the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics and was gunned down while he took a late night stroll in the literal shadow of the Kremlin. Tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky reported on widespread tax fraud in the government to the authorities, whereupon he was arrested and detained in the infamously overcrowded Butyrka prison. (Magnitsky developed gallstones, pancreatitis and later died after receiving inadequate medical care.) Taibbi rattles off names, writers, journalists, friends who were physically intimidated, followed, sabotaged.

When Trump calls BuzzFeed a “flaming pile of garbage,” at least for now, he is all bark, no bite. The dossier goes viral, Trump’s response to the dossier goes viral, watch-dogs and pundits bark at each other in unison. Reporters in Russia needn’t fear for their Twitter mentions, but may be justifiably leery of elevator banks, flight attendants, and late night strolls. When it comes to the Russian press, Vladimir Putin moves like a wolf: all bite, no bark.